“... England is part ghost story, part mystery, and as alarmingly funny as it is disturbing. Shakespeare makes an appearance – he passes in the spirit world as ‘Wagstaffe’, something of a louche lad about town – and is caught on tape having a squabble with another spirit: Wagstaffe: This sceptred isle . . . Morris: My sceptred ...”

“... journeys and drowsy hammocks’, and Youth (which contained Heart of Darkness), reviewed by William Beach Thomas, who had robustly little time for Conrad’s dense pessimism. Two years later, on Chekhov’s death, Francis Gribble magniloquently wavered on the fine point of the Russian’s stature: ‘he may or may not have been a man of genius.’ Too ...”

“... movie character.) George Orson Welles was born in 1915 and appeared first as the wunderkind whose Shakespeare productions – the ‘Fascist’ Julius Caesar, the ‘voodoo’ Macbeth – dazzled New York theatregoers in the 1930s and who, when not spooking radio listeners as the voice of the Shadow (an invisible detective ‘who knows what evil lurks in the ...”

“... of company now left me in the world.’ To be of that fellowship, one had to be pretty determined: William Allingham, the editor of Fraser’s Magazine, was a regular companion on Carlyle’s afternoon walks, though he is ‘perpetually busy with Fraser & as I told himself long ago has a tendency to be a bore’. Carlyle’s collective term for visitors was ...”

“... without meanness, and if mentally thick, nonetheless a durable and somehow a reassuring presence.William Blake’s​ parents, like Gillray’s, belonged to the Moravian Church, and their early careers ran parallel in other ways. Blake’s first book, Poetical Sketches, came out in 1783, the same year as Gillray’s first major political cartoon, Neither War ...”

“... of Indiana University, whose principal work extended from the 1930s to the 1960s. We learn of William Lee, sanitary reformer and colleague of Edwin Chadwick, who found his match in the equally expansive (canon-wise) James Crossley – a more cautious and cunning operator, the extent of whose activities as a corpus-sweller has not been fully apparent until ...”

“... poetry,’ Hamilton writes, which sets the stakes high, to be sure; and when we learn that William once tried to write up a poem from one of her journal entries and found himself stuck, Hamilton is not slow to draw the anti-aesthetic moral: ‘Clearly there is an integrity or propriety to Dorothy’s literalism that resists poetic translation.’ Her ...”

“... at a frieze on the side of the (then) new Columbia library. It said ‘Goethe ... Voltaire ... Shakespeare ... Molière ... Dante ...’ And sure enough, just as you’d feared, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac, that little football scholarship guy from Lowell, Massachusetts, had wanted his name on the wall too. Yes he did. A few years after his appearance on ...”

“... has sometimes had a similar effect. If a third could fix the family resemblance, it would not be Shakespeare but a character in Shakespeare. Maybe the Hamlet aspect of Burke and Hazlitt explains a part of their enchantment. All three characters are thinking all the time, and their thoughts move at a higher ratio to ...”

“... Dallas persuaded him to offer it for publication, and Byron told him to approach the bookseller William Miller, who declined it. John Murray’s father, also a bookseller, had published Dallas in the past, and it was to Murray that Dallas turned next. Dallas turned out to be unreliable both as a witness and as an agent. The story has ‘scarcely a word of ...”

“... invasion of France. After the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603, Shakespeare’s outlook changed, but Hutson sees King Lear as turning away from the matter of Britain while Macbeth plays down the constitutional integrity of medieval Scotland. The ‘erasure’ of Scotland, she claims, continued in Jacobean England.Some of ...”

“... was not the only contemporary to wonder in retrospect at the Auden effect – what the painter William Coldstream called ‘a real magic and glamour in his presence’ – and shrewdly put his finger on part of it: the figure Auden cut was at once impressive and comical, as though acting out some great running joke about authority or seriousness. He strode ...”

“... of these dusty masterpieces. Petrarch is ‘numbingly tedious and repetitive’, and if you find Shakespeare’s Sonnets a bit of a drag the former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford agrees that ‘though they are world famous, they may disappoint modern readers. Some of them consist largely of complicated wordplay, and scarcely engage our ...”

“... Culture’s got to go’ (the course, they meant – but it sounded more ominous than that). William Bennett, Secretary for Education, also came to visit the campus. He is the author of To reclaim a heritage: A Report on the Humanities in Higher Education (1984). Bennett thought that Western Culture had to stay and said so, face to face with Stanford’s ...”

“... in King Lear that he could never bear to reread the play’s last scenes until forced to as a Shakespeare editor. In ‘Poetical Justice’ Enright’s speaker presents himself as similarly disturbed by tragedy’s unfairness: It will be many years before I read again Of the death of Cordelia, Or indeed (though he deserves cuffing) Of the Macduff boy’s ...”